Ben Carson: I'm Being Pressured to Run for President

Neurosurgeon Ben Carson is under a growing amount of pressure to seek the presidency, but he says he still doesn't want to run.

Still, he hasn't ruled it out entirely yet.

"It wasn't on my bucket list at the time I retired," Carson told NBC "Meet the Press" host David Gregory during a roundtable discussion on the Sunday news show. "I didn't [want to run] and I still don't want to."

But there is a "lot of pressure," said Carson, who is a rising star in the Republican Party without holding a public office. "I'll see how things go. I'm never going to say absolutely or absolutely not until it is an absolute."

Whether or not Carson is running in 2016, he thinks presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton can be defeated if she decides to seek the presidency.

"I do think she's beatable," said Carson. "Everybody is beatable. Anybody who is human is beatable."

Carson said he has spoken with Clinton on many occasions, and "she seems like an intelligent individual."

However, he suspects there are "lots of possibilities" that Democrats will come up with many potential nominees, as the election is still over two years away.

Carson, emeritus professor of neurosurgery, oncology, plastic surgery, and pediatrics from Johns Hopkins Hospital, has written in his new book, "One Nation: What We Can All Do to Save America's Future," that there have been many attempts over the years to "get me to throw my hat in the political arena.

Further, he wrote, he has "been offered support from around the country and tremendous financial resources if I decide to run for national office. But I have not felt the call to run," he wrote, adding that "If I felt called by God to officially enter the world of politics, I would certainly not hesitate to do so."

Carson's political popularity is continuing to grow, especially considering his attacks on the Obama administration and its policies. He is still under fire, though, for commenting that Obamacare "is really, I think, the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery" and saying that it is "slavery in a way because it is making us all subservient to the government."

And while Gregory wondered if the statement was how Carson "really wanted to be defined," Carson pointed out that he didn't say Obamacare was slavery, but the "worst thing since slavery."

"I said 'in a way,'" Carson pointed out. "In a way, anything is slavery that robs you of your ability to control your own life."

And when you take your healthcare, said Carson, and allow the government and its bureaucrats to take it over, "I think you have done the wrong thing."

Further, he told Gregory, when one examines neo-Marxist literature, "you don't have to listen to what I say, about taking control of health care of the populace and making the people dependent. This is not what America is about."

Carson said he does believe in healthcare coverage for everybody. But he also thinks "There are much better ways to get there which leave the care in the hands of patients and of doctors."